Adventures of an Underwater Photographer

Details: I wanted to dive as many new sites on the Yorke Peninsula as i could, and Port Victoria was on the list. Conditions looked great so i headed out on the jetty, only to find that it had been fenced off half way along. So back i went to do an entry from shore. The water was a bit hazy on entry but cleared up a little bit out the end. Overall i was pretty underwhelmed about this site. Fish life was poor, pylon growth fairly average, and generally not much going o. I think i must have hit it on a quiet day, since i’ve heard good reports about this site. Oh well..you win some you loose some.

Details: Klein Point is a working jetty, which requires checks with the Port Authority to ensure no ships are in. I’d heard it was a good spot for Leafy Seadragons so i was keen to check it out. It was getting late in the day, and the signs on the gate threatened a lock in after 5pm. I wasn’t sure how certain this was, but i had to cut the dive shorter than i would have liked so i didnt get myself into trouble. I swam across from the carpark to the jetty, over a small bay of seagrass. Under the jetty, it cleared with sandy patches and scattered structure. The fishlife was really great here, with more schools of Black Drummer, Old Wives, Moonlighters, and even a Blue Grouper. The bottom drops off into the channel to about 10m, but most of the stuff was under the jetty. An unusual feature of this jetty is the large cylindrical concrete structure forming part of the jetty. Shoreward of the jetty was some nice limestone reef with overhangs, however they were pretty low profile and shallow. I hoped to find Leafies around this more natural reef area, but i had no luck. More time at this site would have been good, but it was small enough to see most of it in a shortish dive.

Just for my interest, i decided to write some online calculators to determine the Maximum Operating Depth (MOD) and Equivalent Air Depth (EAD). I’ve added these as “pages”, so they can be accessed in the header links of the site. But here’s some links to them:

I’ve just added a new lightbox viewer for images in the posts. Previously, when you clicked on an image it would open that image in a boring white new screen. I think this looks much nicer now and you can scroll through each of the images in the post without having to read my uninspiring commentary! ;) I’ve also decided to increase the size of the images so you can see the same detail i do when i’m editting them.

Here’s a fly as an example of what the new lightbox and size will look like:

Let me know what you think…especially if the image size is too big for your screen and you have to scroll around to see the whole image. Thanks!